(Teaching) Essayist Literacy in the Multimedia World

Santosh Khadka

Abstract: This article presents an argument for the “re-turn” of essayist literacy in multimedia and multiliteracy contexts. For its democratic, pedagogical, and intellectual potential, essayist literacy is too important to be removed from composition curriculum, but it needs to be re-imagined within a diversity of essay traditions, including the turn toward multimedia writing undertaken in diverse writing classrooms. This article analyzes the findings from a study of one such ‘re-imagined’ essayist literacy unit/assignment in a composition course designed to focus on multiliteracies at a research university in the Northeast United States.

I’m
emphatically not arguing the essay as the sole or even main genre for
writing instruction. I am arguing that it needs to be in the mix.
Douglas Hesse

The decline in essayist literacy has been viewed as the decline of
knowledge itself.
Ron Scollon and Suzanne Scollon

Adam
Banks’s chair’s address at the 2015 Conference on College
Composition and Communication in
Tampa, FL, triggered
heated discussion on the place of “the essay” in writing
curriculum. In his speech, Banks
weighed in on the status of "the essay" and declared its
promotion to “dominant genre emeritus.” While recognizing the
value of “the essay,” Banks wanted to “acknowledge the rise and
promotion of many other activities around which writing and
communication can be organized” and urged writing teachers to move
past this dominant genre and teach writing in its expanded sense,
including “multimodal, multimedia forms of composing.”

From
Twitter to listservs, writing teachers and scholars reacted to his
speech, some interpreting it as a call for the field to abandon the
essay, and others maintaining that Banks was just opposing a
mechanical and stilted version of the academic essay, not the genre
of the essay itself. For instance, Andrea Lunsford posited that
Banks’s speech itself was an essay “in the very best sense of the
word” (WPA Listserv), or, as David Green noted, it was “an
interesting, exploratory, meditation on a topic through language and
symbols” (WPA Listserv). As these scholars pointed out, Banks was
not, in fact, pitching the idea of sacrificing essayist literacy in
all its manifestations; his major issue was with the static five
paragraph, thesis-driven, academic textual form that has potential to
stifle the creative and innovative use of multiple media/modes,
languages, and forms of expression in variegated forms of composing.

As
Banks’s speech and the ensuing discussion illustrate, the genre of
“the essay” and its place in the writing curriculum is a
contentious one. Many
scholars argue that essayist literacy should not be removed from
composition curriculum since it is valued for
its historical and current role in knowledge production,
preservation, organization, and dissemination; for its flexible form,
which can sponsor its writers’ and readers’ space for critical
reflections and conversations with other genres and text forms; for
its pragmatic function in numerous situations, ranging from the
college admission process to a job search; for its humanistic and
democratic values; and for its merit as the medium of inquiry,
argument, or pursuit of knowledge (Badley,
Hesse, Olson, Bloom, Scollon and Scollon, Heilker, Trimbur).
Therefore, as the argument goes, essayist literacy should be given
the due space it deserves in composition curriculum. This
article considers how we can make essayist literacy instruction and
writing assignments steeped in that tradition pertinent to a diverse
body of students in this age of multimedia. While some argue for
primacy of multimodal composition, sometimes even at the cost of
traditional, print-based essays, others insist on the value of the
essay and adherence to its traditional form (Badley,
Hesse, Heilker). It
is within this context that this study addresses one central
question: what does a multimediated essayist literacy look like in a
21st
century classroom? In an attempt to explore this question critically,
and extensively, I designed a research study of the writing practices
of college students
that explores how the form we ask students to produce can be
re-imagined within diverse essay traditions, multimedia contexts, and
students’ multiliteracy practices.

Essayist Literacy for a Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classroom

The
typical essay form our students are being asked to produce now is far
removed from the original notion of essay introduced by Michel de
Montaigne and has been challenged by the plural literacy traditions
our students bring to the classroom and the increasing trend of
multimodal essay composition inside and outside the academy. In
the Montaignean sense of the term, subjectivity, pursuit of truth,
and exploration characterize an essay, as opposed to the objective
and neutral tone associated with the current ‘standard’ academic
essay. Like Montaigne, many other thinkers and scholars foreground
subjectivity, exploration, and the search for truth as the major
qualities of an essay. One among them is Georg Lukacs, who argues
that “[T]he
essay ... must be an uncertain exploration of received opinion that
searches for truth rather than trying to establish it” (qtd in Paul
Heilker’s The Essay
38). Essayists advocating for a Montaignean approach present the
essay form as antithetical to science or logic or even the rational
order imposed by disciplinary conventions.

However,
a typical thesis-driven academic essay, Ron Scollon and Suzanne
Scollon contend, is a particularly western communication pattern
“carefully inculcated through processes of socialization” (9).
Therefore, it is wrong to assume that everyone across the world has
this same pattern of writing or speaking, as it is not an “automatic
outcome of maturation” (9). Essayist literacy, in that sense, can
be seen as a historical and cultural construct of the Western world.
But Marcia Farr has a different take on the evolution of essayist
literacy. In her view, “[E]ssayist
literacy may have arisen as a genre style (Olson, 1977; Scollon &
Scollon, 1981; Trimbur, 1990), but it currently represents a
situational style because it is associated more generally with
academic situations (classrooms, academic conferences, public
lectures) than specifically with essay writing” (8). Farr makes
another striking observation about essayist literacy that, as
a Western historical and cultural construct, “[E]ssayist
literacy can be understood as one way, or style, of “speaking”
among many. Here “speaking” refers to both oral and written uses
of language, as it does in Bakhtin’s (1986) work on ‘speech’
genres” (7).

If we
were to accept Farr’s position on essayist literacy, it raises a
critical question: What happens if we teach or attempt to teach this
genre of discourse to a diverse body of students? Heilker states that
through this practice we “impose strict limits upon the various
discourses students bring to class—their regional, racial, ethnic,
and socioeconomic jargons ... ” (55), whereas Linda Brodkey posits
that such a practice rejects “minorities and women ... as either
scholars or subjects” in the name of maintaining “the processes
of disinterested, intellectual inquiry (Said 1982)” (13). Farr
herself contends that many groups of students are discriminated
against as they “use spoken and written language in ways that
contrast sharply with the implicit model of language use underlying
much writing instruction in this country” (5). Our current model of
instruction privileges some over other groups of students, continues
Farr, because “[T]hose
who already know and use, at least in some contexts, discourse that
resembles this taught model relatively closely have less difficulty
learning to produce texts that conform to it than those whose
naturally acquired discourse differs from it” (5). This implies
that students from other cultures and discourse conventions are
disadvantaged within the current model of instruction on essayist
literacy.

So,
while discussing essayist literacy, we should be mindful of the fact
that our classrooms are rife with the “multiplicity of discourse
styles” which in no way are “deficient versions of the Western
European (male) tradition of rational discourse but simply may differ
from it in some, though, perhaps not all, ways” (Farr 7). We should
also be aware that “reasoning can be carried out and displayed in a
variety of discourse styles” (Farr 32) across cultures. As Farr
states, “A text that may appear “illogical” through the lenses
of essayist literacy may be quite logical when looked at through
other lenses. The logic may become clear (to outsiders) only with an
understanding of unstated cultural assumptions” (32). The
implication of this for our instruction is that “[S]tudents
whose ‘ways of speaking’ may differ significantly from the ways
of essayist literacy are not taught effectively by instructors who do
not understand and appreciate the sociolinguistic repertoire they
have brought to the classroom with them” (Farr 33). Hence, the
re-imagination of this literacy form and the ways it is being taught
to diverse students in composition classes is imperative.

Such
a re-imagination of essayist literacy, however, entails an
integration and incorporation of multimodal and multilingual literacy
practices that our students regularly engage in their daily lives,
and/or that regularly feature in many contemporary media platforms.
Expanding the genre this way facilitates a more critical
understanding of its “traditional” designation as a neutral and
objective academic prose form, for it recognizes that this genre is
not necessarily a static and stilted text form, but a flexible
semiotic mode capable of accommodating multiple media and discourse
styles that our students bring with them to our classrooms.

Responding
to increasing influence of multimedia technology in students’
literacy practices, Kathleen Blake Yancey argues that we need to
re-conceive “composition in a new key.” According to her, such a
reconceived notion of composition or writing includes print, but it
also includes writing for the screen and an understanding that
writing is not just textual but also visual.
Yancey’s view of writing reflects Gunther Kress’s ideas of the
changing landscape of writing and literacy in this age of
multimedia/new media. Kress writes that given the “theoretical
change ... from linguistics to semiotics—from a
theory that accounted for language alone to a theory that can account
equally well for gesture, speech, image, writing, 3D objects, colour,
music and no doubt others” (35-36), the language modes, such as
speech and writing should have to be “dealt with semiotically” as
they constitute “a part of the whole landscape of the many modes
available for representation” (36). Jodie
Nicotra also speaks of the literacy landscape, but from the point of
view of changes in material technologies of literacy, shedding light
on the evolution of literacy and literacy technologies over time—from
orality to writing, from writing to print, and from print to digital
media. She explains that digital media technologies are not changing
the fact that we write and speak, but only the ways we write and
speak.

In
following Nicotra’s line of argument, it can be said that we and
our students still compose, but compose with different media
technologies, and this fact challenges the ways we teach our students
to compose, as Steven Fraiberg notes: “composition for the
twenty-first century requires a shift toward conceptualizing writers
as ‘knotworkers’ negotiating complex arrays of languages, texts,
tools, objects, symbols, and tropes” (107). Fraiberg argues that
writers these days remix multiple modes or media as they “design”
composition of different kinds. According to him, as the “flow of
content across multiple media platforms” collides, intersects,
crisscrosses, and interacts “in unpredictable ways” (Jenkins
qtd. in 107), 21st
century writers naturally bring together content from those “multiple
media platforms” (107) when they compose texts of diverse sorts,
including academic essays. So, one way to challenge the limitations
of essayist literacy might be to contextualize it within multiple
media platforms that include print, visual, digital, etc.

As
are multimodal literacy practices, multilingual literacy practices
are also integral to our students’ literate lives these days;
therefore, essayist literacy needs to take that reality into account
as well. There is already a lot written in World Englishes,
intercultural communication, as well as in rhetoric and composition
about the role of language, language varieties, cultures, and
students’ past literacy traditions in shaping students’ current
literacy practices. Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher, for
instance, argue that cultural ecologies influence literacy practices,
whereas Steven Fraiberg contends that multilingual writing is a
design like any other literate practice. Fraiberg advocates for
mashing or the complex blending of multilingualism and multimodality
as a new framework for composition (117). In fact, multilingualism
and English language varieties (World Englishes) are long held to be
great semiotic resources for composition as they contribute to and
increase what Selfe calls the bandwidth of semiotic resources for
composition by making available all means of persuasion (Selfe,
Aurality and Multimodal Composing). For
instance, Yamuna Kachru
notes that writers from Outer (countries where English is spoken as a
second language) and Expanding Circles (countries where English is
spoken as a foreign language) use different rhetorical organizations
in writing because of “nativization of English” and
“Anglicization of indigenous languages” due to increasing
“contact between English and local languages” (379). Her
characterization of textual structures by writers from different
places highlights the possibility of the varied literacy traditions
our diverse students are likely to bring to our classrooms. Our
students’ plural discourse structures and literacy practices ask us
to re-vision our current understanding of essayist literacy and how
we teach the essay genre in a globalized writing classroom, informed
by multiple languages, modes of representation, and meaning making
practices.

Essayist Literacy Instruction in the Multimedia Age: A Research Study

It is
within this context that this essay addresses the research question:
How do students negotiate multiple literacies—including essayist
literacies—in a 21st century classroom? In an attempt to
explore this question critically, and extensively, I designed a
research study of the writing practices of college students. For the
study, I collected argument essays from unit 2 in my course focused on
essayist literacies (see Appendix 1) but situated
among assignments that were less traditional and called on multiple
literacies—essay reflections, blog posts and responses, portfolios
and portfolio reflections—from fourteen student research
participants. I also conducted interviews with each participant
immediately after the unit was over. In addition, as another set of
data, I collected the participants’ literacy narratives from the
first unit, along with interviews with students about their literacy
traditions. Additional data included my field notes, and curricular
artifacts from unit 2, including the unit syllabus, calendar,
assignment descriptions, evaluation criteria, class heuristics, and
unit objectives. I examined this data in light of relevant
theoretical insights from scholarship in essayist literacy and other
closely connected fields—intercultural communication, World
Englishes, rhetoric and composition, and new media.

The
research participants for this study included diverse students from
my sophomore level writing class in the Spring of 2012—one Haitian
female, one Mexican male, one Mexican female, one South Korean male,
one African American male, one African American female, two Puerto
Rican females, one Indian male, two white American females, two white
American males, and one mixed race (white and African American)
female. My course for this particular class was framed around the
idea of multiple literacies, or multiliteracies (New London Group,
Schwartz, Lynch and Wysocki) for diverse students in this age of
globalization and technologies. Inspired by Michele Anstey and Geoff
Bull’s argument that “Globalization
provides a contextual necessity for us to become multiliterate”
(175), my course took up multiliteracies in its broader frame, with
multiliteracies not only encompassing the notion of plural
literacies—such as visual, cyber, academic, critical, digital, new
media, and intercultural, among other kinds of literacies (Kalantzis
and Cope; New London Group; Anstey and Bull; Hawisher and Selfe;
Selber)—but also entailing the ability to interact using multiple
Englishes in English speaking contexts and multiple
writing/communication styles across cultures and disciplines.
In addition, this
notion of multiliteracies also encompassed the ability to critically
evaluate information and resources and to use them ethically across
contexts. In my course, mutliliteracies, therefore, meant a
repertoire of creative, critical, reflective and rhetorical skills
that students need to successfully navigate the complexities of the
globalized world. With regards to essayist literacy, in particular,
the notion of multiliteracies spoke to students’ acquisition of
skills and ability to choose, practice, and negotiate different forms
and levels of essayist literacy as the writing context or occasion
calls for them. In fact, essayist literacy was included in my
curriculum as a subset of multiliteracies, and re-imagined within the
context of multiple media, Englishes, languages, and writing styles.

Through
triangulation and rhetorical analysis of all the data sources, I
found a complex negotiation happening in the students’ process of
essay writing, from topic selection, to location and evaluation of
sources, to adoption of a particular essay form or style. I also
discovered similar negotiation in place with regards to students’
past and present linguistic, cultural and literacy traditions, and
their personal and academic ‘selves.’ Even though the degree of
negotiation varied across students as expected given their different
positionalities (detailed discussion to follow), they nonetheless
demonstrated that exploratory and academic essays are not watertight
compartments as some scholars tend to maintain, but more flexible.
The findings from this study also challenged my assumptions about
diverse students’ linguistic and stylistic negotiations during the
composing process in English for academic audiences. Based on my
prior readings of scholarship in rhetoric and composition, applied
linguistics, and literacy studies (Canagarajah; Young; Lu; Pennycook;
Horner, Trimbur and Royster; New London Group), my assumption going
into this research was that if provided with an appropriate
assignment, instruction, and resources, international multilingual
students would negotiate multiple languages, writing styles, essay
forms and literacy traditions much more actively and effectively than
domestic American students. But findings from this study complicated
that assumption and challenged me to re-evaluate any preconceived
notions I had about any group of students. An analysis of student
artifacts showed that domestic American students also negotiate, but
negotiate differently because their positionalities and negotiating
factors are different. Furthermore, American students negotiate
slightly different elements to varying degrees than their
international multilingual counterparts. As the case studies analyzed
below also demonstrate, domestic American students do not negotiate
linguistic or cultural differences as complexly as international
students while writing in English for American institutions; they
nevertheless negotiate, for example, formal and informal tones,
personal and academic ‘selves,’ and thesis driven and exploratory
essay forms if their composing and research processes are supported
with relevant resources and instruction. Thus, on the one hand, this
study challenged my assumption about the composing process of some
groups of students; on the other, it also demonstrated the
effectiveness of my pedagogical strategy that students in globalized
classrooms (Khadka) should be taught to negotiate a number of
factors, such as linguistic, cultural, and stylistic differences, and
binaries in essay forms (such as exploratory/thesis-driven,
inductive/deductive, alphabetic/multimodal etc.), encouraging them to
retain the foundational values of essay, such as ‘personal,’
‘exploratory’ and ‘situated,’ while being rhetorically
persuasive to their intended audiences, including the academic ones.
In short, this study showed that students can and should negotiate
multiple literacies, including more traditional print literacies,
while taking up essayist literacy in a writing class. The findings
from this study suggest that we can productively foreground
negotiation, or shuttling (Canagarajah, Toward)
on multiple fronts of language, culture, dialect, style, and media, as the major
goal while teaching essayist literacy in a diverse 21st
century writing classroom.

In this study, I made triangulation the central part of analysis because
it is highly valued in qualitative research for its function of
cross-verifying interpretations and research findings with additional
testimonials. For
triangulation, I used multiple sets of data—student texts,
interviews, field notes, curricular artifacts, and relevant insights
from multiple interconnected fields of study—intercultural
communication, World Englishes, new media, globalization, and
rhetoric and composition, which also served as analytical frameworks
for my study. Another
factor I accounted for in this study is participants’
positionalities in light of the prevailing research theories that a
writer’s position in a context (essay writing context, for
instance) is shaped by his or her gender, class, race, culture,
language, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, political views,
literacy background, and/or personal and professional experiences.
Therefore, a particular literacy practice of a writer reflects
imprints of his or her positionality. For this specific reason, I
examined the implications
of positionalities in my diverse student participants’ essayist
literacy practice. I
collected the details on their positionalities by asking them to
compose extended literacy narratives and by conducting follow-up
interviews with additional questions around their literate lives in
the past and present. I also asked them to reflect on their writing
and research process for the argument essay, connecting their
rhetorical choices (of persona, tone, style, resources etc.) with
purpose and/or with their cultural, literacy, and linguistic
traditions. I used all these data in conjunction with other sets of
data collected through multiple research methods for the purpose of
triangulation, and for analyzing participants’ research and writing
process in this particular assignment. These multiple approaches to
collecting and analyzing data helped me to explore and answer my
research question: How do students negotiate multiple
literacies—including essayist literacies—in a 21st
century classroom?

Curricular Design

Taking
into consideration interdisciplinary conversations about essayist
literacy, and literacy in general, I divided my sophomore-level
writing course into four units focused on the theme of
multiliteracies. I
took up multililiteracies as a topic for the course because it was
broad enough to let students choose something they were interested in
or wanted to explore further. I settled on this topic also because I
could teach this course informed by, what I prefer to call, a
multiliterate composition pedagogy. Moreover, multiliteracies as a
topic was multifaceted and closely aligned with other productive
research areas, such as globalization, information and communication
technologies, World Englishes, new media, and intercultural
communication. In order to familiarize students with the concept of
multiliteracies, I had a small set of articles, and videos in my
calendar. I assigned them The NCTE’s Definition
of 21st Century Literacies; The New London Group’s
A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social
Futures; Howard Gardner’s The Washington Post
article: The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading;
Victoria Department of Education’s Video Series: 1. Considering
Multiliteracies and 2. Exploring Multiliteracies; and two YouTube
videos: A Vision of Students Today
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o) and
Multimedia and Multi-literacies in the Composition Classroom
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4zSDOQ9mVY).

The
first unit (See Appendix 2 for assignment details) in
my course was dedicated to learning from students about their literacy traditions
(literacy narrative assignment) and teaching/practicing critical and
visual literacies (rhetorical analysis of a digital artifact
project), whereas the third unit was meant to introduce students to
the notion of remediation (Bolter and Grusin) with some hands-on
training with “repurposing” media (See
Appendix 3 for details on
remediation project). Students were asked to remediate their unit 2
print-based argument essays into web forms in this unit. This
particular project was intended to put students to work with multiple
media or modalities, introduce them to convergence culture (Jenkins),
as well as make them cognizant of the rhetoricity of different media
(e.g. website vs. print), or the dynamics of
intercultural/interracial communication. Unit four, on the other
hand, was dedicated to documentary production (See
Appendix 4 for
details on collaborative documentary film-making project), in which
students collaborated in groups of three to produce a movie on a
controversial contemporary topic like Occupy Wall Street, the Trayvon
Martin (shooting) case, or the Democratic Movement in the Middle
East.

While units 1, 3, and 4 were fruitful and interesting for students and me,
the unit given relatively more time and space in the curriculum was
the 5-week-long unit 2. This unit was given due importance in
recognition of the value of essayist literacy in students’ academic
and professional lives, and for its key place in course structure and
the assignment sequence. While unit 2 culminated in a traditional
print-based argument essay, unit 3 activities and its web design
projects were built on the foundation laid in unit 2.

While
designing unit 2 based on essayist literacy in particular and the
course itself in general, I had to negotiate a number of things—my
research agenda/s, my program requirements/course learning
objectives, current scholarship in essayist literacy and
multiliteracies, and my own evolving sense of composition curriculum
for a diverse classroom. For instance, I was flexible in source
requirements for the essay even though one of the designated outcomes
for the course specifically states that the course is geared toward
teaching students to use “library resources” and some methods of
primary data collection. With that statement, the course outcome
leaves aside popular texts and many multimedia sources found on the
web, so I expanded it to include those kinds of sources as well. This
demonstrated that sources, in this age of multimedia, are available
in digital mediums as much as they are in print mediums; that
information is available in popular sources as much as they are in
scholarly sources; that each medium (such as image, text, and sound)
has its own unique affordances, and mediums work more productively in
combination than in isolation; that compositions, even essays, now
are increasingly multimodal and/or multimedia; and that information
abundance is both a boon and bane at the same time. In order to
ensure that students actually get acquainted with and use both
scholarly and popular sources
in different formats, I specified the potential types and number of
sources to be used in the essay, and also provided them with the
description of the evaluation process for locating and selecting
credible and relevant sources.

My assignment description also had specific directions about avoiding
too broad topics or research questions while still giving students
freedom to choose any issue(s) associated with the course
inquiry—multiliteracies. Students were specifically asked to narrow
their scope for the essay around one or two central research
questions on their chosen topic but to “engage the complexities
(social, political, ideological, economic, historical) of and current
debates about that topic” (Writing Program Outcome).

Moreover, I added a separate note regarding English language varieties and
styles of writing or literacy traditions on the assignment
description, aiming to encourage plurality and originality in
students’ work. This particular note on language and style was
intended to make students aware of the fact that communities across
the world compose texts in different styles; they do speak different
languages, even if only different varieties of the same language.
Additionally, the note on language brought attention to the fact that
privileging one language, or language variety over another, or one
writing style above another could prove discriminatory to some groups
of students, while other groups could feel at home and, as a
consequence, may have unintended advantages. Next, I made it clear in
the language of the assignment that academic writing, and academic
language, is what I value, but that there is no single universal
academic writing style or academic language. With that note on World
Englishes and plurality of academic writing styles around the world,
I negotiated the notion of academic writing articulated in the
designated course outcomes while complicating the traditional notion
of essayist literacy in the context of globalization and increasing
cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interactions. Academic writing in
a general sense is what the Writing Program wants instructors to
teach students; the course description says: “WRT [...]
focuses on the rhetorical strategies, practices, and conventions of
critical academic researched writing,” which implies plurality of
academic writing with the term “conventions,” but
neither the course description nor the learning outcomes speak
specifically about the form of the essay or the type of sources, or
the writing style, or the language variety to be used or adopted in
the class.

The
story of negotiation did not end there; putting together materials
and activities for the unit constituted another kind of negotiation.
On the one hand, there is no denying that a course driven by
multiliteracies as an inquiry should reflect ‘multi’ in its
course materials and artifacts too, which means the course materials
should ideally be an assemblage of texts in multiple media, multiple
modalities, and multiple forms; on the other hand, this particular
unit was dedicated to essayist literacy, which in a traditional sense
is print-based literacy. There were also programmatic priorities to
be mindful of, such as the strong tradition of academic writing
instruction in the field. Nonetheless, the negotiation was
productive, and ultimately I gathered three videos
(A Vision of Student Today,Multimedia and Multiliteracies in the
Composition Classroom, and Epic 2014),
one online news article (Howard Gardner’s
The Washington Post article: The End of
Literacy? Don't Stop Reading),
one website (Victoria Department of Education’s multiliteracies web
page), three print texts, (Making an Effective
Argument, a chapter from Jack Selzer and Lester Faigley’s
Handbook, Good Reasons; Yamuna Kachru’s book chapter,
Speaking and Writing in World Englishes
from The Handbook of World Englishes; and Sheila J.
Ramsey’s journal article, Interactions between
North Americans and Japanese: Considerations of Communication Style),
a set of handouts on different aspects of writing and research (such as
narrowing the research focus; locating and evaluating print and
Internet sources; textual, visual and multimodal analysis and
argumentation; drafting a research proposal; evolving thesis; claim
making and synthesizing sources; annotated bibliography; composing,
revising and editing process; codemeshing and translanguaging;
methods of data collection and analysis; stylistic and linguistic
plurality/diversity; dialoguing with sources; and documenting
sources), and some sample documents as unit texts. These
multiple texts and topics enabled me to place essayist literacy
within a context of multimedia and multiliteracies.

Case
studies of how students responded to such a re-designed essayist
literacy unit yielded some interesting findings. I will present some
of them here.

Case Studies: Sophia and Andre

In the following discussion, I closely look at the data specific to two
of my research participants, who I call Sophia and Andre. My analysis
is specifically focused on the kinds and degrees of negotiations
these participants engaged in their writing and research processes
within the context of essayist literacies. I particularly examine the
moments and instances of negotiation in action with respect to their
choice of topics, languages and/or English varieties, their decision
on “personas” and writing styles, and their determination of
sources and forms for their respective essays. For instance, I
analyze how these participants explored and narrowed topics for their
research; how they evaluated and selected sources for their essays;
how they settled on writing styles including the use of tone,
diction, languages and/or English varieties; and how they decided on
the form/s for their essays. The analysis organized this way helps to
make sense of multiple sets of data and also to examine in detail how
or whether students engaged essayist literacy in its expanded sense.
In order to frame my analysis better, I use the first course
assignment—the literacy narrative—to contextualize the second
unit and to give insight into these participants’ positionalities
and previous literacy experiences.

Sophia

Sophia
is a Hispanic female student from Puerto Rico. Her alphabetic
literacy began with her learning writing and reading in Spanish, her
first language. From first grade on, she also started taking English
and Math classes. Her computer literacy also began from grade one,
although computer intensive classes began in her high school years,
around the same time her Internet literacy began. Her literacy
narrative details her preliminary literacy education as follows:

The first language I started using for writing was Spanish, a year after
I also started writing in English. I began reading in English and
Spanish when I was about five or six years old, yet I have always
made use of the English language when it comes to working on a
computer. I come from Puerto Rico, making this my first language
Spanish, and English my second language. I learned to speak English
because my mother and grandmother would always play Disney sing along
videos and movies for me, and the books they bought me were usually
in English, so that I was able to learn it more quickly and have a
better core or base in this language than what was taught in school.
(literacy narrative)

In
Sophia’s digital literacy learning experience, the hegemony of
English is evident; she reports that she has always used English in
digital activities even though Spanish is her first language. As an
English-as-a-second-language speaker, she confesses that she
struggles to switch between her first and second language while
writing in English: “Having to switch languages back and forth also
makes my writing experience confusing and limited, if I happen to not
know how to write something in specific or the way I think of it in
Spanish is not ‘the correct way’ to write it in English”
(literacy narrative).

Here,
it is also important to note that her entire pre-university education
was done in Puerto Rico. In her argument essay for unit 2, Sophia
discusses the language policy debate in Puerto Rico in some length,
exploring the larger cultural and historical issues associated with
this high-stakes topic, and presenting her position on the debate.
Initially, she had planned to talk about the English language policy
in Latin American and Caribbean countries, but later narrowed her
focus to the language policy in Puerto Rico. She discusses her
narrowing process in her reflection essay:

I had
the curiosity of learning about how the English language is presented
and taught in Latin America and the Caribbean, but this topic
resulted to be too broad and I was not able to find many good
articles or specific books on the topic since these countries have a
wide range in culture, and laws and policies on language. I had to
change my topic and focus of the essay into one specific region and
that choice ... was the English language in Puerto Rico.

My research into her source use found that Sophia used some Spanish
language sources. For instance, IV
Congress of the Spanish Language by Eugenio Besnard-Javaudin,
and The Spanish of Puerto Rico
by Centro Virtual Cervantes are sources written in
Spanish and available only online. Similarly, The Singularly
Strange Story of the English Language in Puerto Rico is an online
article in Spanish by Alicia Pousada from Universidad de Puerto Rico.
Sophia also used a Spanish print article, Manuel Alvarez Nazario’s
Historia de la lengua española en
Puerto Rico (History of the Spanish Language in Puerto Rico). Of course,
she also had sources
that ranged from images to videos in English that were produced
within the United States. In that sense, there is diversity in her
source use, and her sources come from scholars and publication forums
(both print and web) from across borders. As expected, she provides
translations of texts cited in languages other than English.

Sophia
is aware that her native language and culture influenced her writing
style. She says: “because my main language is Spanish ... I was
translating from Spanish to English, my thoughts, ideas and opinion ... I
would read books in Spanish and would translate them” (interview).
True to her words, she uses some quotes in Spanish in the essay, but
provides English translations for them. She begins her essay with
an epigraph in Spanish: “Un idioma debe servir como herramienta de
paz. Nunca para oprimir. Siempre para liberar. –Ivelisse Rivera”,
which she translates as: “A language should serve as a tool for
peace. Never for oppression. Always for freedom.” Since
she is more proficient in Spanish than in English, she says that she
has to “switch languages back and forth,” which makes her
“writing experience confusing and limited” (literacy narrative).
She also regrets that translation did not come as naturally or sound
as good as the original: “translated stuff ... does not sound like an
English” (interview).

This
confusion and translingual challenge is reflected in her style. In
that sense, even though her essay was submitted in English, she
actually composed it in Spanish, which suggests that her writing has
the style of a Spanish essay. Structurally, Sophia says, Spanish and
English essays are different, and she was taught to compose them
differently: “Spanish essays begin with an introduction, and they
really do not talk much about thesis statement” (interview). Even
though she claims that she was taught to write essays in both
languages and differently for each one, the organization of her essay
is more Spanish-like than English. For instance, at the beginning of
her essay she had a long section that traced the historical accounts
of language policy in Puerto Rico: “I
provide a summarized history of Puerto Rico since the Spanish
colonial times until the colonization of the United States and how
these various establishments have affected the people of Puerto Rico”
(from her essay). Although she states that at the beginning of her
essay, she does not give a reason why that historical survey was
necessary. Only after that long section follows her thesis,
which she reinforces time and again in the essay except for in the
conclusion. Instead of reinforcing or circling back to her claim, she
ends her essay with a call to language teachers of Puerto Rico:
“Teachers
have to work with motivating students to appreciate the Spanish
language more and learn it with passion as part of their culture, and
also encourage them and teach that it is also important to learn
English, and many other languages to expand their knowledge and
become better intellectual human beings” (from her essay). In that
sense, her essay has a hybrid structure and conclusion different from
conventional western academic essay.

Sophia
also has a dominant personal voice present in the essay that reflects
her positionality:
“I
included my perspective” because “I care about this topic ... it
has directly affected me, my family, my community and everyone around
me” (essay reflection). Her strong personal presence in the essay
has to do with her personal investment in the topic: “I
personally support the idea of learning another language to expand
our horizons, yet it should not be done by force, but because the
people actually have an interest and a need to be more intellectual
in terms of learning the language” (essay).
She has an engaged voice in that she directly addresses her audience,
for instance, in this excerpt from her essay: “I
think that language creates and helps shape the culture of a country
or region. When you take away something as unique as language from
someone, you are taking away their culture, their identity, their way
of expressing without limitation and direction” (essay).
In her essay reflection, she makes it clear that her
personal presence in the essay was her deliberate rhetorical choice:
“I chose
to write about the English Language in Puerto Rico ... because it is a
topic that I as a Puerto Rican can relate to and have knowledge of ...
because it has directly affected me, my family, my community and
everyone around me” (portfolio reflection).

Sophia’s
composing process is notable for a number of reasons. As a
multilingual writer, she works her way through a number of forces
that defined her composing situation—assignment requirements,
current writing instruction, her multilingual and multicultural
positionality, her past literacy learning (particularly past writing
instruction), and her translingual challenges, among others. For
instance, she uses an epigraph from a Spanish text and also cites a
number of sources produced by Spanish-speaking authors outside the
Unites States. Her practice is ideal from a point of view of
integrating multiple sources; it nonetheless raises a number of
questions about translation and its complexity—how close to
originals are her translations or the translated versions of
originals she cites? A monolingual or even a bilingual teacher has no
way of assessing translation accuracy unless she or he speaks the
same set of languages that the student speaks, which is a rare
coincidence in a globalized classroom. Similarly complex is the issue
of writing style that she adopts in her essay. She notes that she is
aware of the differences in organizational patterns of typical
English essays and Spanish essays, yet her essay organization does
not reflect her adherence to an English essay writing style. Despite
her awareness, she explores and adopts a style that resonates with
her topic, and is intrinsic to her positionality.

My
goal in this unit/assignment was to encourage students to negotiate
writing styles, languages, and media for particular audiences and
situations. Sophia’s essay is testimony to the fact that she
negotiated a number of factors while composing this text for American
academic audience, and her essay form departs from a traditional
thesis-driven academic essay form. Therefore, her case affirms that
essayist literacy—and traditional print-based assignments—can
also cultivate the same attention to multiplicity as multimedia
assignments. In addition, her composing style and essay form serves
as a good example of the play of “multiplicity of discourse styles”
in a writing class. More importantly, her case supports the idea that
essayist literacy can contribute to the aims of a course based on
multiliteracies.

Andre

Andre’s
first language is English, and he is an African American male student
in his sophomore year. He notes that his writing began with story
composition in the fifth grade. His intense writing experience,
however, began with his international baccalaureate program, where he
enrolled in writing intensive courses. Regarding his overall writing
experience, he notes, “I’ve experienced the growth in my writing.
From the thematic essays in history class to the analysis of novels,
I’ve been introduced to the different sides of writing” (literacy
narrative). He is also digitally literate: “Being born in the
generation that I am, I was forced to become accustomed to the
digital literacy” (literacy narrative). He began his digital
literacy with typing and video games but later worked up to the
complex tasks of assembling and disassembling the hardwares of
desktop computers. He also learned to work with the Internet soon
after. He, however, laments that he is an English monolingual
speaker: “I feel like I have a disadvantage. So many people come
from different places, and they have two languages or more. Most of
my friends speak other languages. Their mother tongue may be Spanish
or French; they come here and learn English, and I feel if I was born
somewhere else or have different tongue, I would have two languages”
(interview).

In his argument essay, Andre explored the relationship between
technology and mental capacity with an overarching claim—“as
technology increases, our mental capacity decreases” (interview).
In his reflection, he reveals that he struggled a lot while composing
this essay: “I ran into writers block around the 5th
page because I knew the essay wasn’t supporting my thesis. Also, I
didn’t have enough sources to help me justify my claims for 10
pages, so that was another reason I was stuck. But once I change my
thesis for the better, I was able to find sources for my argument and
the oppositions” (essay reflection). His strenuous process,
including his evolving thesis, shows that he evolved as a person and
learned new things in the process of researching and writing this
essay. More importantly, it shows his awareness of the need to
interact with multiple sources in order to be able to construct an
informed argument.

Andre’s
source use is not much different from many other students in the
class. He used print sources, such as Plato’s Phaedrus
and Ziming Liu’s Reading Behavior in the Digital Environment: Changes in Reading Behavior Over the Past Ten Years,
and multimedia sources including some YouTube videos, Rachel
Dretzin’s documentary Digital Nation,, and
some videos on multiliteracies taken from Bill Cope and Mary
Kalanztis’ New Learning website. However,
when it comes to his writing style, Andre reports that he consciously
chose to represent himself, and his topic, in a particular fashion
based on his positionality:

[F]or
writing style, I had to think about how I wanted the tone of the
essay to sound, because in unit 1 it was very communicative/funny and
it was like to get the audience to laugh a little bit and this is a
research paper, I want it to be stern, I want it to be like this is
my voice and this is what I am saying, you guys should believe this,
but also at the same time I did not want to scare the reader away. I
want the people to have the comedic side: a couple jokes, metaphors
so that people could actually have fun reading so I combined more of
humorous side to what’s really stern and what an academic paper is
all about. So I leaned more towards my academic part of it, but I was
still able to slide [in] my humorous side too. (interview)

From this excerpt, it becomes apparent that he deliberately chose two
different approaches for the two different unit assignments of the
same course. This also shows that he is mindful of the academic
writing situation where a serious approach to a chosen topic is
expected. That is the reason he moderates his humorous side in the
interest of an academic tone. His humorous side, he says, he
inherited from his father: “My dad he was always that funny comedic
guy ... always tells jokes and never stops. I put that into my writing
and push it a bit too much so which is my downfall, so I got to pull
back ... because I am serious but my tone could come out as not
serious because of the comedy in the paper” (interview). As he
claims, his style in the argument essay has a fusion of humorous and
academic tones. Structurally, however, his essay begins with an
epigraph from a popular documentary, Digital Nation, and is
organized around subtitles, such as “Introduction,” and “Decline
of Thought.” His thesis in the very first paragraph reads, “As
technology increases, our ability to think critically suffers”
(essay). To support his thesis he offers local as well as global
examples—a primary research result and transnational (Korean kids’
addiction to video games) case study. Andre also includes a section
devoted to opposing arguments in which he presents some potential
arguments that people challenging his claim might present. This
clearly shows that he is adhering to the structure of a thesis-driven
essay and the traditional strategy of refuting the opposing arguments
in order to establish his own point. In that sense, his essay is well
organized. Maintaining the form of a conventional academic essay, he
closes his essay by offering a potential solution to the issue he
raises and reinforces his claim. Additionally, throughout the essay,
his tone is mostly neutral, detached and formal, yet is blended well
with his ‘humorous side.’ In fact, the only instance where his
personal side was brought into the essay was when he mentioned his
own writing class to further his argument that technology should
complement the human brain, but not rule over it: “The
style of teaching is changing. For example in my Writing class at [...]
University, students are requested to blog about readings that are
done outside of class” (essay). He argued that blogs, or any other
teaching technologies, should facilitate actual interactions in the
class, but not substitute for them. Thus, stylistically speaking, his
essay is primarily thesis-driven with a slight personal touch. This
is significant because he is able to negotiate multiple discourse
styles (personal humor with objective academic style, for instance)
for a specific rhetorical purpose despite the fact that he is a
monolingual writer trained to write in a specific way, and also
despite the
fact that he is writing a traditional print-based essay. His case
demonstrates a more complex view of essayist literacy in practice.

In addition, Andre’s is an interesting example of an essay being a
catalyst for the pursuit of knowledge, and its form a carefully
crafted style of presenting ideas. As he mentions in his literacy
narrative, essay and portfolio reflections, and interview with me,
his essay writing has been a journey of exploration about a number of
interrelated issues pertaining to his topic. His evolving thesis that
he describes when talking about his writer’s block speaks to the
fact that his essaying was tantamount to learning and discovery. His
essay form is thesis-driven—something expected of a domestic
American student schooled in American academic system all his life,
but, in his case, it is something carefully chosen to fit the
academic audience. Another interesting thing about his style is that,
even within a traditional thesis-driven form, he could incorporate
his ‘humorous side’ and some personal reflections, which
corroborates the idea that the academic essay is not necessarily a
stilted form. Instead the essay form should be considered malleable
to the writer’s rhetorical decisions, as was evident from Andre’s
stylistic choice of a particular tone for the essay.

Conclusion and Implications

These two case studies are not representative of all fourteen research
participants in my larger study, let alone of all domestic and
international students in American higher education. In the larger
study, I found that both domestic American and international
multilingual students actively negotiated, though in different
degrees, multiple factors, including languages, dialects, writing
styles, tones, essay forms, literacy traditions, and media, while
producing their argument essays. While the particular positionalities
of these participants informed the nature and degree of negotiation
in the composing process, this study suggested that foregrounding
negotiation of multiple literacies in a writing course or a writing
assignment can encourage students’ learning and practice of
“multiplicity of discourse styles” in a writing class.

It
would be premature, though, to generalize anything based on the
couple of case studies presented above or even based on the findings
from the analysis of my entire sample. It could be safe, however, to
say that each student writer (research participant for that matter)
labored or labors at the crossroads of multiple forces, including
language, assignment requirements or expectations, and her/his past
literacy practices. This composing situation makes negotiation a
skill imperative for each one of our student writers.

Another
aspect this study highlights is that writing teachers play an
important role in student writers’ learning and practice of
“multiplicity of discourse styles,” and skill of negotiation.
However, supporting the growth of this ability in students involves
redesigning both the curricular and pedagogical artifacts we use in
or for the class. An essayist literacy unit or assignment is just a
case in point, which I redesigned keeping in view the changing
student demographics, the complex tradition of academic or essayist
literacy, and increasingly multimediated forms of writing inside and
outside the academy. This curricular and pedagogical experiment was
driven by my conviction that we can no longer overlook the linguistic
and cultural diversity in our classrooms, nor can we ignore the
increasing global interactions of people and ideas, and the
unprecedented influence of media and technology in our and our
students’ literacy practices. In fact, it could be
counterproductive for our students, rhetoric and composition as a
discipline, and for American academic institutions for us to promote
and enforce only the western essayist textual form in our classrooms,
for doing so would be tantamount to imposing a norm from one
particular culture or context on to the other. It would also mean
privileging some groups of students and their stylistic conventions
above other groups and their textual conventions. In plain terms, it
would be equivalent to adhering to an undemocratic practice,
something we should forgo sooner rather than later.

Relinquishing
this practice would involve expanding the boundaries of the course,
unit, or assignment on essayist literacy in order to create spaces
for multiple languages, multiple media, literacy conventions, and
subjectivities or positionalities of the essayists. However,
expanding the boundaries should not be understood to mean the
sacrifice of basic reading and writing skills in composition classes.
Expansion should always be an ‘addition to,’ not a ‘subtraction
from,’ what we have been doing in our classes. For instance,
students in my class did most of the things students in any
traditional writing class would do: critical summary, paraphrasing,
critical responses to unit readings and texts, critical source
evaluation, synthesis of multiple sources, textual and visual
analysis, annotated bibliography, proposal writing, claim-making,
evolving thesis, and so on. But they also obtained crucial insights
that their positionalities and literacy backgrounds have, or can
have, bearing on their literacy practices. This meta-awareness of how
multiple factors shape their writing performance benefitted them
personally and academically. They could see that their
positionalities and past literacy practices could serve as a
reservoir of resources to turn to as and when needed to make their
communicative acts, essays for that matter, rhetorically effective.
They also gained the insight that depending on the writing context
they might find themselves in, they should even be able to suppress
their positionalities and past literacy habits in order to write in a
style and convention of a particular genre in a particular composing
situation.

Therefore,
it is imperative that a course, or unit, on essayist literacy has
components of multiple essay forms, multiple writing styles, multiple
modes and mediums of writing, and multiple presentation patterns
incorporated into it. These components contribute to the development
of the shuttling ability—the idea that students should be able to
move back and forth between differing essay forms, discourse styles,
writing modes, and/or organization patterns, as the writing situation
demands. They should even be able to negotiate those forms or styles
towards their rhetorical end— effective and persuasive arguments
and claims on the topic at hand. Given the value of shuttling ability
in the globalized world (and classroom), I foregrounded it even in
another assignment in the sequence—the remediation project. The
remediation project was an extension to the argument essay
assignment, where students repurposed their print-based essays for
different media and different target audience. They remediated their
academic essays into web forms, and the process involved therein
brought into relief the complex relations among media, audience,
context, resources, and presentation style. Working on this project,
students particularly understood how their rhetorical and stylistic
choices are shaped by the consideration of audience, and medium of
delivery. Building further on this thread, the final assignment—the
collaborative documentary project—provided students with an
additional opportunity to reflect on and respond to a different
composing situation, where a shuttling ability of slightly different
sort was called into service.

Therefore,
it would be in the best interest of cultivating negotiation or
shuttling skill in students to expand the breadth of course materials
by situating essayist literacies within the context of multiple media
and modalities, multiple languages, and multiple literacy traditions.
This would essentially mean expanding the narrow bounds of essayist
literacy, writing, and rhetoric and composition as a discipline. In
addition, this would mean adopting a global outlook to writing by
incorporating into our curriculum, among other things, how writing is
done and taught around the world and how its practice is shifting
with the change in writing technologies (Khadka). In broader terms,
it all would mean the co-evolution of writing curriculum with
multiple technologies, multimedia, and multiple literacy practices
around the world. This would also entail larger shifts in the mission
of composition classes, discipline of rhetoric and composition, and
of American higher education. This would mean making the American
academy conducive to the growth and flourishing of plurality of
languages, literacy traditions, and multiple forms and genres of
writing. Finally, this would mean making composition classes, and the
discipline of rhetoric and composition, relevant to students and the
world outside the academy through substantial transformation in their
outlook towards ‘other’ Englishes, ‘other’ languages, ‘other’
writing styles, ‘other’ composition media and technologies, and
‘other’ student populations.

Appendix 1: Unit 2 Essayist Literacy Assignments

A. 10-12 Pages of Argument Essay on Course Inquiry

You will investigate an issue, debate, problem, controversy or a question
about multiliteracies in relation to other attendant issues, such as
globalization, information and communication technologies, World
Englishes, new media or intercultural communication in some length
and depth. You are required to use primary and secondary, scholarly
and popular, and print and digital (online) sources in your essay.
When you research and develop your argument, you do a number of
things simultaneously: extend a conversation, historicize, make a new
claim, complicate an existing claim or established fact, find a gap
in the studies done, and propose a solution or offer an alternative
perspective. As a college-level student writer, you also make moves
that academics make in their essays: state your thesis or theses at
some points in the essay, make general or specific claims, and
furnish evidences for the claims made. I am aware that it is almost
impossible to come up with some grand universal claims or some
irrefutable thesis or set of theses in a paper of this length, but
you can and have to attempt to present a tentative claim or set of
claims in this paper corroborated by the data or sources you retrieve
through different research methods. Even though it is an academic
essay and you might have been schooled to avoid personal in your
academic essays, I am open to you implicating yourself in the essay
i.e. using “I” or bringing in relevant personal narratives or
experiences from your life. In other words, your essay should ideally
be a combination of personal and academic, experiential and
empirical, and facts and narratives.

A Note about English Varieties and Styles of Writing

As a writing teacher, I am aware that while requiring you to compose
academic essay in academic English, I should not privilege one
variety of English or one particular literacy tradition over other
English varieties or literacy traditions (or writing styles). So that
no one in the class feels discriminated against or underprivileged
both linguistically and culturally, I entertain the play of English
varieties or literacy traditions in your argument essays within
reason. No doubt, I want you to compose your essay in academic
language, the language that other scholars in the academy use, but I
am also cognizant of the fact that there is no single universal
academic language across disciplines or cultures. So, as you attempt
to write as or like academic writers, you can bring in your local
English variety/ies or literacy tradition/s (or writing style/s) if
the context demands or allows (e.g. while citing the local sources or
authors, while remixing your original writing style with the academic
writing style or while offering examples of local/different
argumentation pattern or information presentation style). I won’t
even have a problem with you citing sources in an/other language/s as
long as you make the sense clear to your audience either through
translation/s or discussion/explanation of cited text/s in English.

B. Reflection Paper

In this paper, you reflect on a number of choices you make during the
selection of the topic for your research, while conducting actual
research on your chosen topic, while composing the essay, and while
revising the essay for or before final submission. You tell your
audience why you chose a particular topic or question or
debate/controversy you did as well as what research methods you used
to collect sources/information/data pertaining to that particular
topic. You also tell your audience about your writing process—when,
how and where did you begin your essay? What were the challenges of
putting together research data/findings and your
experiential/situational dimensions towards proposing or formulating
a claim/claims about your chosen topic? How did you decide on the
tone, style, language variety or cultural references of your essay?
How much time did you spend on composing or revising the draft? Why
did you revise if you did? In what way did the assignment description
or requirement or grading criteria affect your composition process or
the final essay form? What is your overall experience of working on
this particular assignment?

A. Alphabetic and Digital Literacy Narratives: 1000 words

Literacy narrative is composing a story about reading and composing in print
and/or digital media.

Step 1: Alphabetic Literacy Narrative

Compose
your literacy narrative in alphabets—using letters and words.
Consider the following questions as you compose:

When
and how did you learn to read or compose texts on papers and (or)
screens? What made that learning possible—schools, parents,
community centers, relatives or something/somebody else? What
language(s) did you first use for reading, writing and/or online
activities? Is English your first language? When and how did you
learn to speak, read and write in English? What about computers and
the Internet? When and where did you first encounter them? What did
you begin with? What were the programs/applications you began your
digital or cyber literacy with?

Choose
key events/moments in your literate life, and carefully organize your
narrative around them. You might want to consider these questions as
you compose: Where did you stand in relation to alphabetic literacy
or digital literacy and where are you now? If you speak more than one
language, you can write your story in the first language and then in
the second language and reflect on the difference in the story itself
because of the language. You can also talk about literacy in the
first language and the second language and the degree of proficiency
in each of them. You can also shed light on the cultural or
linguistic differences and literate practices or talk about digital
divide and literacy learning (for example, English as the default
language in computers or access to the Internet or computer programs
and digital literacy etc.) if that speaks to your situation.

Step 2: Digital Literacy Narrative

Video
or audio record the narrative. Camera on your computer or your phone
should be fine. If you don’t have access to camera, talk to me.

Step 3: Upload the recorded narrative to a computer.

Step 4: Submit me both the narratives in a CD and/or via email.

B. Rhetorical Analysis Assignment

This assignment asks you to compose a 3-4 page of rhetorical analysis of a
media artifact (a music video, digital or video advertisement, movie
or animation clip/s etc.) of your choosing. The text for analysis
should be carefully chosen, and should not be necessarily related to
the course inquiry. It should be rich in alphabetic, audio, visual,
graphic or spatial resources, or, in other words, it should be good
enough for analysis. I encourage you to borrow critical and
rhetorical tools from course materials, such as Arthur Berger’s
book Media Analysis Techniques,
Jack Selzer and Lester Faigley’s Good Reasons,
and the documentary Miss Representation. The
first few chapters of Berger’s book (Semiotic
Analysis, and Psychoanalytic Criticism),
and Chapter 5 & 6 of Good Reasons are
particularly pertinent. You can employ one or all of those approaches
or use other productive concepts or insights, such as rhetorical
appeals (ethos, logos, pathos), stereotypes, status quo, gender or
racial discrimination and/or normalcy while critically analyzing the
artifact. We will do some sample rhetorical analyses in the class
too, so I want you to keep note of critical and rhetorical terms and
concepts discussed in the class and use them in your analysis.
Structurally, your analysis should have at least two parts. The first
part should describe the text/artifact in specific detail. The
description should be vivid and minute to the point of replicating
the artifact in words. The second part is the key to the assignment:
analysis of the artifact. You might want to pick on symbol, sound,
shape, color, images or any other properties of the text and begin
the analysis from there. You don’t have to say that it is semiotic,
Marxist, or feminist analysis, but just do the analysis. Once you are
done with the analysis part, you also should make an overall claim
about the artifact.

Appendix 3: Unit 3 Remediation Assignments

Remediation
is the incorporation or representation of one medium into another. In
their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, J.
David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin argue
that digital or new media are characterized by remediation because
they constantly remediate (present in different media) the contents
from their predecessors such as television, radio, and print
journalism (old media). Remediation, however, is not just an
adaptation of the old. Sometimes, new media present old media in
entirely new ways without any clue to the old and only people
familiar with both know that remediation is taking place. And another
significant fact about remediation is that it is not that only new
media remediate the old but it works both ways. Television screens
and newspaper designs these days look more and more like websites
with convergence of multiple media and modes in those platforms.
Remediation and media convergence therefore are the major phenomena
characterizing the media and composition landscapes in this time of
major technological change.

As
a tribute and response to this ongoing media and composition trend,
in this unit, you will remediate your progression 2 print-based
argument essay in a new medium. I encourage you to remediate it in a
well-designed web site. The assignment is intended to give you an
understanding of relationship among audience, medium, content and
style. Upon completing the assignment, you will see, learn and
experience how audience and medium shape the content and style of
presentation. It is up to you to decide what media assets you want to
use for composition and design ranging from videos, songs, audio
interviews, images, alphabetic text (from your argument essay or
additional texts), graphics to animations. Only limitation is that
all those assets and resources should be rhetorically (effectively)
used to represent (remediate) your progression 2 essay, which is to
say that you should attempt to present similar argument that you made
in your alphabetic argument essay.

B. 3-page Blog Post

Connected
with the remediation project, you will also compose and post a 3-page
long blog post on
your profile in the course site about the rhetorical situation and
composition style, audience factor and source and language variety
choice, audience and document or web design, and media and
composition patterns or forms. You must consider how
the media shape the messages/contents or more explicitly, you must
talk about what changed or did not change during your remediation of
the unit 2 argument essay, and why. In other words, in your blog post
you must engage the dynamics of media and message, content and forms,
audience and rhetorical choices. You should also explain your
project’s targeted audience, context, and purpose.

Appendix 4: Unit 4 Documentary Production Assignments

A. Collaborative Documentary Film Project, and Presentation

In this unit, you will work collaboratively in a group of 3 and produce
8 to 10 minutes of documentary film. You
will choose a movement or event (current or historical) that you find
relevant and interesting and that also connects with some aspect of
course theme. Some potential topics could be Occupy Wall Street
Movement, social media and protest (e.g. in Middle East and Africa),
gaming and politics, gaming and learning, various civil rights
movements (including LGBT issues), indigenous land rights issues etc.
You might want to emulate the documentaries on Steve Jobs and Occupy Wall
Street Movement we watch together in the class. Your documentary
should incorporate a good amount and variety of sources—alphabetic
texts (books, articles, newspaper editorials etc.), audios, videos,
still images, among others- and be organically composed. It should
also demonstrate your knowledge or learning of a number of techniques
such as handling video camera, still camera, incorporating voice over
into the film or editing skills. The juxtaposition of different texts
and narrative voice and their organic unity will be the key
evaluation criteria for your project. Your project should also
reflect your understanding of audience, textual cohesion, and ethical
treatment of sources etc.

B. 2-page Reflection Paper

In this paper, your group must reflect on each and every
choice/decision made during the whole process of documentary
production. You might, for instance, talk about the collection or
selection of source materials, decision on English variety to be
used, narrative voice or work division or other critical dimensions
of the process of collaborative research and composition.

Khadka, Santosh. Rhetoric of World Englishes, Writing Instruction Around the World and a Global Outlook for the U.S. Composition Classroom.Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies 1.1 (2012): 21-37. Web.

Kress, Gunther R. Literacy in the New Media Age. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.